


half-life

by amb-roses (overtture)



Category: Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: #deanisdead, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Twins, Angst, Child Neglect, Gen, Growing Up, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Not Beta Read, Origin Story, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Parallels, Soul Bond, Supernatural Elements, Vignette, ask to tag, but not really, jon and dean are two different people but also they aren't, mental health car, sorta?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 08:59:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18797152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/overtture/pseuds/amb-roses
Summary: He's Jon, or maybe he's Dean. Maybe they both are, maybe they're the same man, broken under the world's weight he's been punished to bear.They never told him about the yearning, the enduring, the agony of it. That sometimes this profession wasn't worth the entirety of your life that you had to dedicate, because if you didn't sacrifice your soul and more, you wouldn't make it a single step further. Wrestling always had a way of bringing people together, but they never told him it was this literal.They didn't tell him a lot of things.





	half-life

**Author's Note:**

> i started writing these, and this chapter specifically, right after the mox promo thing came out mid my writing burnout, and stubborn as i am, tried to organize my thought... to disastrous effects. i recently decided that while all the content i wrote Could be made into a big, long, coherent narrative, im in no place to do that right now with my real life about to get crazy busy. i also know myself well enough that if i dont post about it eventually/some time soon, i'll never come back to it. ive been toying with this idea for a million years, though, so... heres a little series thingy to tide yall over! as usual, will probably edit later lol
> 
> (anyone else find the #deanisdead on mox's insta super spooky?)

Jon grows up in a shitty neighborhood in Cincinnati, which is probably why he's so sick all the time.

His mother either doesn’t care or _can’t,_ he honestly can't tell. She definitely knows something’s wrong with him, definitely keeping things from him, but the few times she’s clean and sober enough to hold a conversation she tells him with sorrowful eyes that he’s not old enough yet.

Whatever.

He doesn’t know his father and neither does she, but it doesn’t matter because the only thing that _does_ is that he has a roof over his head and nobody around to try and lift anything off him. Things look up for awhile, til he’s twelve. He’s twelve, tucked into bed unable to sleep, when his mom’s current boyfriend beats her over the head and invites his friends over. When he eventually rolls out of bed, sleepless the next morning, there’s a distinct lack of money and television.

His mother is still out cold. Jon leaves for the day. They don’t really recover after that.

He’s only a few years older when he goes homeless and gets expelled from school within the same month, and he barely scrapes through high school after that, an hour long walk that becomes twenty when he manages to find a decent place to squat nearby. It’s startlingly free of any drug dealers that take one look at him and load him with their drugs and kick his shit in later for the money, free of any sharks with crooked blades and leering grins.

It drips when it rains. He hates the damp, it aggravates his occasional sickness and constant aches and pains, but it’s better than ending up dead in a ditch somewhere, like he was supposed to be years back. Fate wanted him rotting a long time ago.

He sticks to his familiar side of the city, in the gutters and damp, abandoned builds, in the shadows, scrapping with broken knives and a fearlessness that’s homegrown, and it’s all he has in his fate-defying body to not break under the weight of the weakness that seems to plague him. Occasionally he feels a pull, like there’s a magnet under his skin, a yearning that urges his feet to walk, to search for something. It always yanks from the west, though, and west means crossing territory.

Jon doesn’t follow the call. Instead, he carjacks for gangs and himself when he needs a ride or a new place to stay, and keeps what he finds. It works, he survives, and now there’s nobody to get on his case about _getting help_ and _fixing him_ and _curing him_ or whatever the fuck. Nobody dares even get close enough for him to bite and claw—

Les Thatcher grabs him ‘round the neck one night, in sheets of summer down-pouring, and punts him on his ass. He nearly gets his jaw broke before the man brushes him off and corals him into the building behind them. He gets a towel to the face, a hot drink, and wrestling lessons from then on.

Thatcher _hmm’s_ at him with a certain glint in his eye, tells him there’s no way he could make it as a wrestler, and smirks challengingly.

If wrestling doesn’t work out, Jon decides as he scrambles to his feet, maybe making people eat their words would make a fine profession.

 

He realizes a day later that he was easily manipulated. He downs the rest of the hot chocolate with shaky hands and bounds to the ring when he’s called, anyway.

 

Between one year and the next, his body chugs on and so does he. Between one year and the next, his body burns inside out, more and more, and any free clinic he gets checked out at seems to vary in estimated times of death. Sometimes, he has days. He checks himself out and finds a nice car to sleep in for awhile, maybe buys some nice chips from the corner store he normally has the cash to buy often. He never dies those few days, and when he returns, they tell him he has a month.

A month passes, and nothing happens. He stops giving a shit and stops getting check-ups.

 

Between one year and the next, he realizes the shittiness of his body coincides with the pull of his feet, and he finds himself at a junkyard across town.

A man with his exact face stares back at him when he lifts his head from the engine he was leaning over.

“What the hell?” The impostor snaps.

“What the _fuck?”_ Jon barks.

The impostor turns to face him properly.

Jon punches him in the face.

 

* * *

 

His name is Dean and he grew up in a shitty junkyard in Cincinnati, which is probably why he grew up so sickly.

His mother looked nothing like him, he knows she’s not his actual mother, but she treated him like shit. She definitely knew something’s wrong with him, was definitely keeping things from him, but the few times he was actually home when her newest boyfriend wasn’t, or she was sober, she told him with sorrowful eyes that he wasn’t old enough yet. She never tells him.

His dad, the one he has for a few years, teaches him how to fight like a street dog, how to use his high pain threshold to his advantage, how to draw blood because blood and injury drew fear, fascination, and money. He's rough around the edges, but soft, good in a way Dean so desperately wants to be. He's a good father figure, long enough to give baby Ambrose the best parts of himself, he'd like to think. He eventually leaves, and he honestly can't hold it against him.

The one thing he doesn’t teach him is how to stay down.

He goes homeless in his teens but still manages a highschool diploma, just barely, just to prove all those fuckers wrong. They kick him off the football team, then the baseball team. He spends his sophomore year in a detention center, and he still fights for that damned diploma. He swears he’s never smirked so big when he crosses the stage. He takes lickings after school and makes it out in time for dinner with enough money to buy some nice potato salad and a steak to fry at the only place in town that’ll keep dumbasses like him around.

The junkyard gives him a lot. The only car he’s ever— and will ever if he has anything to say about it— owned, Shelly. Gave him the comfort that comes with knowing what a car has to give. Gave him his Extreme Trampoline Wrestling ring made of old scrap, rope, and the half-broke trampoline that’d been dumped a few years before. Nearly gave him tetanus a few times, but the guy who brought him his Shelly was kind enough to help pay for the shot. It teaches him about trust. It gives him a real home. It keeps him out of trouble for close to eighteen months after the detention center.

It gives him Delinquent Dean. It gives him focus like he’d never felt before. A sense of passion that wasn’t damn near suicidal and thoughtless. It teaches him how to focus his rage, leave it in the ring for something more productive.

He scavenges kneepads, pulls ‘em over his jeans because they’re one of the only things he has and he’s never worn no fancy trunks and ain't gonna start now. He doesn’t got the money for those anyways. He only finds one elbow pad and throws it on his left arm, trades his jacket out for a tank top but keeps the dog tags. He shoplifts some reusable wrist tape and rewinds them over and over, wringing them for every ounce of usage til they literally snap when he tries to fasten them.

But as much as fate has graced him, his body is still weak, still plagued with whatever shitty illness he was graced with from the womb he'd never gotten diagnosed. Maybe his real mom was an alcoholic or a druggie and it was what made his body so sickly and tired. 

Sometimes he feels a pull, like there’s a magnet under his skin, a yearning that urges his feet to walk, to search for something. It always yanks from the east, though, and east means crossing territory.

Dean doesn’t follow the call. Instead, he fixes cars for cash, wrestles in the area for himself and for the extra money on the side as his body ebbs and flows. Between one year and the next, his body chugs on and so does he. Between one year and the next, his body burns inside out, more and more, and when he eventually works up enough money, he gets himself checked out.

All they give him a time of death, and he spends it in his junkyard wrestling ring. The date comes and goes, and nothing happens. He goes to a free clinic the next time, and they give him a funny look, call him some other name despite his insistence, and tell him he’s got a month left to live. A month passes and nothing happens. He stops giving a shit, and stops getting check-ups.

It’s nearly a year later when he’s half buried in Shelly, a wrench held in tight, sweaty hands, when he lifts his head and squints over at a man with his exact face.

“What the hell?” He snaps in surprise.

“What the _fuck?”_ The impostor barks.

Dean turned to face him properly, to check if he was hallucinating in the summer sun.

His double clocks him across the face.


End file.
